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In San Antonio, a Coach’s Player, a Player’s Coach

SAN ANTONIO — Gregg Popovich has never worried that Tim Duncan will lobby management to get rid of him behind his back. They are as tethered to each other as this city is to the Alamo. For 15 of his 16 years as the Spurs’ coach, Popovich has told assistants, “We have the easiest job in the N.B.A. because of Tim Duncan, because of who he is and the way he conducts himself.”

But here in the land that N.B.A. time forgot — where there is no “I” in team, only in Tim — folks still face a universal chronological challenge. If growing apart is not a problem, growing old is. Duncan, the most minimalist superstar of the modern professional basketball era, will turn 36 on April 25. Popovich, the only N.B.A. coach Duncan has had and with whom he has won four championships, is 63.

Though reports of the Spurs’ competitive death were greatly exaggerated after they lost in the first round of the playoffs to Memphis last spring after a 61-victory regular season, the question persists even as their quest for a fifth title continues: how much life do they really have left in them?

“As for us being dead, it’s that way every year,” Duncan said with a shrug. “For a while now, it’s been, ‘We’re getting too old.’ I guess it’s going to happen eventually. Somebody’s going to be right.”

Duncan sat down to talk last week a few minutes after the doors to the Spurs’ practice center opened on the morning of their first meeting with the Los Angeles Lakers this season. A handful of reporters strolled in and scattered to various players and coaches, leaving Duncan to a rare visitor from out of town at the far side of the court.

After the interview, Tom James, the Spurs’ director of media services, said it had been the longest Duncan had done in a while. It had lasted 10 minutes.

Such is life with No Drama Duncan, who has become such a predictably understated fixture for this franchise that on some days he might as well be one of the basket stanchions. He has never sought attention or glory. When he considered leaving San Antonio as a free agent in 2001 — for Orlando — he did so without fanfare or folly.

Ultimately, Duncan stayed in San Antonio, where he lives year round, and seems overwhelmingly likely to finish his career as that rarest of N.B.A. commodities: a leading man who never forced change on himself (to another city) or on the franchise (by demanding a new coach).

On both of these issues, why would he have had to? Since Duncan has been here, patrolling the paint, the Spurs have never won fewer than 50 games in a nonlockout season and have the best winning percentage — just short of .700 — among franchises in the four major North American team sports.

“Unlike some other guys, I’ve been lucky,” he said. “With the teams we’ve had, with the focus of the people here wanting to put winning teams together, of having a system and sticking to it. There’s no better way to do it. It’s a special situation, obviously, and everybody can’t have it.

“In other places, coaches come in and out, and there are guys who have four or five in the same amount of years, and that’s a situation I can see why you’d want to get out of. But people changing for size of market? That I really don’t understand.”

When Duncan was asked if any of the young N.B.A. power brokers — for instance, Dwight Howard, who reportedly went backdoor in an attempt to oust Coach Stan Van Gundy in Orlando while refusing to commit to the franchise beyond next season — had ever sought his counsel on the benefits of laying deep roots, he shook his head and said, simply, “Nope.”

Told of the exchange, R. C. Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, laughed and said, “Very few people can have a conversation with Tim that would last long enough for them to get that much out of it.”

Photo

The dynamic between Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich is nearly unheard of in the N.B.A.Credit
Bahram Mark Sobhani/Associated Press

A star player does not have to be a lifer to develop a strong relationship with a coach that positively affects his team. A new coach can draw the very best from a player, as Phil Jackson proved in Chicago and Los Angeles with Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. Perhaps Carmelo Anthony is on the way to establishing that brand of simpatico with Mike Woodson in New York.

But given the length of the Popovich-Duncan marriage, two competitive souls together for 15 years in so pressurized an environment, Buford called the dynamic almost too good to be true and virtually unheard of in the N.B.A. John Stockton and Karl Malone come to mind, but they did not play for Jerry Sloan during their early years in Utah, and Bill Russell — not Red Auerbach — coached himself during his last three years with the Celtics.

“I think this term is often overused, but there are very few relationships where the relationship between player and coach can be described as a real soulmate,” Buford said. “But we’ve been fortunate enough that Pop and Tim are connected that way. When things are tough, they’ve got that. That’s their rock.”

It is not because Popovich, an acerbic Air Force veteran, has not had his less amicable moments with Duncan.

“I probably get on him more than I get on, say, Gary Neal,” Popovich said, referring to a Spurs reserve guard. “ ‘Timmy, you getting a rebound tonight or are we just going to leave and go to dinner?’ He’ll look at me say, ‘Hey, I’m trying,’ but he can be criticized. He’s not embarrassed to be called out in front of the team.”

Over the years, Duncan has been granted some roster input, especially as the Spurs have overhauled a supporting cast for him, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker that had become long in the tooth and heavy in the legs. The additions of young players like Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green and DeJuan Blair — all starters in a deep, minutes-sharing rotation stitched together by Buford — have allowed Popovich to limit the minutes of Duncan and Ginobili, 34, while not missing a regular-season beat.

But is it enough for the Spurs — with their lack of high-wire skills and reliance on an international blend of team-first players — to survive two playoff months?

After his team briefly supplanted Oklahoma City as the Western Conference leader, Popovich unapologetically left Duncan, Parker and Ginobili home for a road game in Utah, where the Spurs’ 11-game winning streak ended. Three nights later, in what Popovich called “an embarrassing loss,” the Bryant-less Lakers dominated the Spurs with Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol making them appear small, earthbound and creaky.

The next night, Duncan put up vintage numbers ( 28 points and 12 rebounds) in a 107-97 victory over the Grizzlies, moving Popovich to gush, “He was a monster.”

Duncan’s contract is up after this season, and he dismisses talk of retirement.

“As long as I’m healthy, as long as I’m effective, I’m taking it as it comes,” he said. “It’s been a great year for me. Minutes are down. As a competitor, I want to play more, but honestly, I can’t beat feeling as healthy as I do. That’s why Pop regulates my time and being the bad guy at times when I want to be out there. In the long run, it helps me.”

And there lies the basis for longevity: a fundamental trust that can be confounding and elusive to some, not all, of the young and the restless.

“He’s got that kind of character, and a lot of people don’t understand what that means life-wise,” Popovich said. “You’re taking on a personal challenge. You put it on yourself. ‘No, I don’t need to be with so-and-so, and I don’t need to go someplace else. I’m going to do what I have to do, and I want to get it done here.’ ”

Here in south Texas, where Duncan has followed David Robinson’s lead of staying put, where the public-address announcer simply says “Tim at the line” when he shoots free throws and where even Popovich becomes misty-eyed when he takes a moment to consider the eventual end of the era.

As to its lasting effect on him, Popovich said, “It’s been an incredible opportunity, an incredible responsibility and an unbelievable gift to have somebody who is not just that good a basketball player, but is so respectful of the process that he trusts and allows us to coach.”

To which the beleaguered fraternity of X-and-O N.B.A. lifers would say, amen.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2012, on page SP7 of the New York edition with the headline: In San Antonio, A Coach’s Player, A Player’s Coach. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe